Eifelheim

by Michael Flynn

  One creature was supported by two of its fellows. It opened its mouth as if to speak; but what issued forth was not words, but a yellow pus that dribbled down its chin. Dietrich tried to shriek, but his throat was choked with fear. Nightmares arose from childhood of the great stone gargoyles of the Köln Minster come alive in the night to steal him away from his mother’s bed. He turned, flight in mind, only to find that two more of the creatures had come up behind him. He smelled the sharp tang of urine and his heart pounded like the Schmidmühlen trip-hammers. Were these monsters the folk that spread the pest?

  Max whispered, “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” over and over. Otherwise, all was hushed. Birds silent, only the low susurrus of the wind. The forest beckoned, its bracken and recesses a lie of safety. If he ran, he would become lost — but was that not better than to stay and be lost for all eternity?

  Yet he was all that stood between these apparitions and his two companions, for only he had been consecrated with the power to cast out demons. From the corners of his eyes he saw Max’s fingers frozen on the hilt of his quillon.

  Dietrich’s right hand inched up his chest and gripped his pectoral, holding the Crucified One before him like a shield. A demon responded by reaching slowly toward a scrip that hung from his belt — only to have his hand stayed by his companion. The hand had six fingers, Dietrich noticed, not a comforting number. He tried to speak the words of exorcism — I, a priest of Jesus Christ, do abjure you unclean spirits… - but his throat was spitless.

  A shrill buzz pierced the air, and every head turned toward the barn, from which another creature had emerged, this one dwarfish and with an oversized head. It ran toward them and one of the taller demons let out a clacking ululation and charged after it. To do what? To rip their souls from their very bodies?

  At that, the tableau broke.

  Dietrich cried out.

  Max drew his quillon.

  The demon behind them pulled a strange, shiny tube from his pouch and pointed it at them.

  And Hildegarde Müller staggered down the ridge toward the demons below.

  She stopped once and looked back, locking gazes with Dietrich. Her mouth parted as if to speak; then she set her shoulders and continued forward. Oddly, they drew back from her.

  Dietrich seized his fear and watched the unfolding drama with dreadful concentration. God, grant me the grace to understand! He felt that much depended on his understanding.

  Hildegarde halted before the demon spewing pus from his mouth and she extended both hands to him. The hands clenched, drew back, opened again. And the demon fell into her arms and collapsed against her.

  With a thin, high cry, she went to her knees in the dust and ashes and wood chips and cradled the creature on her lap. The greenish-yellow ichor stained her clothing and gave forth a sweetish, sickly odor. “Welc—” She stopped, swallowed and began again. “Welcome, pilgrims, to the hospitality of my home. It pleases — . It pleases me that you might abide with us.” She stroked the thing’s head gently, looking much like the Sorrowful Mother in those Vesperbilden that had lately grown popular, save that her eyes were squeezed shut and she would not look on what she comforted.

  Everything came clear for Dietrich in a sudden, dizzying rush. The monster cradled by the miller’s wife was badly injured. The effluvium that issued from him was a humor of some sort. The strips of cloth the demons wore were the torn and burnt remnants of clothing employed as bandages around limbs and torsos. Their bodies and faces were smoke-smudged and the motley of their skin signified dull-green bruises and scratches. And do hellish creatures suffer earthly torments? As for the smaller creature who had charged them buzzing like an angry hornet…

  A child, Dietrich knew. And demons had no children; nor did they run and snatch them up into their arms as did the second creature racing close behind.

  “Pastor?” said Max. His voice trembled. He was on the point of breaking, and with his hand on a knife. “What manner of demons are these?”

  “Not demons, sergeant.” Dietrich had seized hold of Max’s wrist. He glanced at Hildegarde — and the injured one. “Men, I think.”

  “Men!”

  Dietrich held fast. “Think, sergeant! Are there not centaurs, half-man and half-horse? And what of the blemyae of which Pliny wrote — men with their eyes in their torsos? Honorius Augustodenensis described and sketched dozens of such.” The words tumbled and fought each other, as if they fled from his own tongue. “Stranger beings than these grace the very walls of our church!”

  “Creatures more talked of than seen!” Yet Dietrich felt the man untense, and so released his knife arm. The sergeant backed away a step, and then another. One more step and he runs, Dietrich thought.

  Then would tales run through the village and down the mountainside to pool in the ears of Freiburg; and a commotion would ensue in this quiet fleck of earth. Preachers would find God or Devil in the hearing and announce new heresies. Ecstatics would claim these creatures in visions; philosophers gravely question their existence. Some would in hidden rooms burn incense and pray to their images; others would ready the stake for those who did. Questions would be asked; Inquisition would be made. Old matters would be remembered; old names recalled.

  A woodleafsinger trilled from the treetop and Dietrich noticed how the monsters shrank from an innocent bird.

  “Max,” he said. “Hurry to the parsonage and fetch my bag of salves and my copy of Galen. It’s bound in dark brown leather and has a drawing of a man’s body on the cover.” He doubted Galen had much to say on injuries to demons, but he could not let anyone vomit his life into the dirt without some attempt to save him. “And, Max,” he said, calling after the man. “Tell no one what we have seen. We want no panic. If anyone asks, say that… that these strangers may carry the pest.”

  Max gave him a serious look. “You’d warn them of the pest to stay a panic?”

  “Then tell them something else. Leprosy. Only keep them away. We have need of cool heads. Now hurry — and bring my salves.”

  Dietrich slid down the face of the ridge to where the creatures stood, now in a compact mob. Some held axes and mallets at the ready, but others bore no arms at all and shrank from him. A stack of logs had been placed to the side of the strange white building, and Dietrich realized that they had been clearing the broken trees from around it. Yet how could such a large building have been erected in the midst of the forest without a clearance to begin with?

  He knelt beside the creature that Hilde comforted and moistened his fingers with spit. “On the condition that you have led a just and good life, I baptize you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” He traced a cross on the thing’s brow. “Amen,” said Hildegarde.

  Dietrich rose and brushed his habit off, wondering whether he had committed sacrilege. Held Heaven a place for such creatures? Maybe, had they souls. He could make nothing of the injured one’s featureless gaze; could not, indeed, know if it was gazing or not, as there were no lids to the faceted hemispheres. The others had not turned a head while he gave their fellow a conditional baptism. Yet he had the uneasy feeling that they were all looking directly at him. Their strange, bulging eyes did not move. Could not move, he guessed.

  Discovered now, what would these creatures do? That they had sought to remain hidden boded well, for their unnatural presence, demonic or not, must remain secret. Yet, they had builded themselves a house on the Herr’s land, so it seemed that they meant to stay, and no secret could keep forever.

  * * *

  2. Now: Tom

  Tom Schwoerin was no hermit. He was the sort of man who liked company and, while hardly boisterous, he enjoyed a song and a drink, and there were clubs in town where he had once been a Known Man.

  That was before he met Sharon, of course. It would not be fair to call Sharon a wet blanket, but she did put a damper on things. This is not entirely bad. Carbon rods are dampers, too, and to good purpose. There had been something frivolous about Tom befor
e she took him in hand. A grown man ought not wear so much grease paint. Sharon put a stop to that, mostly, and some of her seriousness had rubbed off on him.

  So Tom, when on the scent, could give a credible imitation of a hermit — albeit one with a more chatty disposition than most. He liked to make his ideas real, and this meant talking about them aloud. Sharon usually played the unwilling role of Ear — often very unwilling, as on that particular evening — but it was the talking that mattered, not the hearing. Tom would have talked to himself in a pinch, and sometimes did.

  He knew quite well that he had been thrown out of the apartment. He was not especially alert to the subtle cues of human relationships, but it was hard to miss the old heave-ho, and a man need not be particularly sensitive to feel a little vexed over the matter. Visiting the archives really was the sensible thing to do when seen from the clear, cold heights of logic; but logic wasn’t in it.

  * * *

  The medieval collection in the Teliow Memorial Library had started with a small art collection, housed in a gallery decorated to resemble a medieval hall. There were some fine pieces there: triptychs, altar fronts, and the like. There followed: bibles, psalters and other incunabula, pipe rolls and cartularies, registers and estate papers, ledgers and accounts — the raw materials of history. Primary sources bought at auctions or found in troves or bestowed by tax-weary donors; never edited, never published, grouped loosely by source into folders, tied in stacks between pieces of heavy cardboard, and hidden away to await a scholar sufficiently desperate to wade through them. They had been lying in wait for Tom and had caught him fair.

  Tom had prepared a list. He was not the methodical sort, but even he knew better than to dive headfirst into uncharted waters. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he did know what sort of thing he was looking for, and that was half the battle. So he scrutinized the contents of each carton, setting aside certain documents for more careful perusal. Along the way, he acquired stray bits of the trivium and the quadrivium, for he was the sort of man who cannot look up one thing without in the process finding half a dozen others things. In this manner, the sun grew long, and passed into evening.

  * * *

  Amidst the chaff already winnowed lay by that time but a single grain of wheat: A note in an 17th century index of episcopal court cases that, “de rerum Eifelheimensis, the matter of the baptism of one Johannes Sterne, wayfarer, had been mooted by the death through pestilence of all the principals.” This index had been compiled in part from an earlier 15th century index, based in turn on long-lost 14th century originals.

  Not exactly hot on the trail.

  He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead and contemplated surrender. He might have packed it in then, had it not been for a nudge from an unlikely direction.

  “You know, Doctor Schwoerin,” said the nudge, “we don’t get many live ones in here.”

  Paul on the Damascus highway could not have been more startled apprehending a sudden voice. The librarian, who had dutifully shopped cartons for him all night in silent obscurity, stood by table with the carton he had just finished braced against her hip. She was a fine-featured woman, decked with a long print dress and adorned by large, plain glasses. Her hair met behind her in a tight bun.

  Lieber Gott, Tom thought. An archetype! Aloud, he said, “I beg your pardon?”

  The librarian flushed. “Usually researchers phone their requests in. One of the staff scans it into the computer, charges the cost against the appropriate grant, and that’s that. It can be terribly lonely, especially at night, when all we do is wait for requests from overseas. I try to read everything I scan, and there’s my own research of course. That helps some.”

  That was the nexus. A lonely librarian wanted a human conversation, and a lonely cliologist needed a break from his fruitless hunt. Otherwise, no words at all might have passed between the two of them that whole night.

  “I needed to get out of the apartment for a while,” Tom said.

  “Oh,” the young woman told him, “I’m glad you came. I’ve been following your researches.”

  Historians do not normally acquire groupies. “Why on earth would you do that?” Tom said in surprise.

  “I majored in analytical history under Doctor LaBret at Massachusetts, but differential topology was too tough for me; so I switched to narrative history instead.”

  Tom felt much as a molecular biologist might upon encountering a “natural philosopher.” Narrative history wasn’t science; it was literature. “I remember my own problems with Thom’s catastrophe surfaces,” he ventured. “Sit down, please. You’re making me nervous.”

  She remained standing hipshot, with the carton. “I don’t mean to keep you from your work. I only wanted to ask you…” She hesitated. “Oh, it’s probably obvious.”

  “What is?”

  “Well, you’re researching a village called Eifelheim.”

  “Yes. The site is an unexplained void in the Christaller grid.” That was a deliberate test on Tom’s part. He wanted to see what she would make of it.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Abandoned and never resettled?” Tom nodded confirmation. “And yet,” she mused, “the locus must have had affinity or it would never have been occupied in the first place. Perhaps a nearby site… No? That is odd. Perhaps their mines were depleted? Their water dried up?”

  Tom smiled, delighted at her perception, as much as her interest. He’d had a difficult time convincing Sharon that there even was a problem, and all she’d come up with was a common cause, like the Black Death. This young woman at least knew enough to suggest local causes.

  After he explained his problem, the librarian frowned. “Why haven’t you searched for information from before the village’s disappearance? Whatever caused its abandonment must have occurred earlier.”

  He swatted the carton. “That’s why I’m here! Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs.”

  She ducked her head to the storm. “But, you’ve never referenced Oberhochwald, so I…”

  “Oberhochwald?” He shook his head in irritation. “Why Oberhochwald?”

  “That was Eifelheim’s original name.”

  “What!” He stood sharply, knocking the heavy reading chair backwards. It hit the floor with a bang and the librarian dropped her carton, folders skittering across the floor. She clapped a hand to her mouth, then stooped to gather them up.

  Tom darted around the table. “Never mind those now,” he said. “It was my fault. I’ll pick them up. Just tell me how you know that about Oberhochwald.” Lifting her to her feet, he was surprised at how short she was. Sitting, he had thought her taller.

  She pried her arm from his grasp. “We’ll both pick them up,” she told him. She set the carton on the floor and dropped to her hands and knees.

  Tom knelt beside her, handed her a folder. “Are you certain about this Oberhochwald place?”

  She stacked three folders into the carton and looked at him and he noticed that her eyes were large and brown. “You mean you didn’t know? I learned only by accident, but I thought you… Well, it was a month ago, I think. A brother in the theology school asked me to find a rare manuscript for him and scan it into the database. The name Eifelheim caught my eye because I had already scanned several items for you. It was a marginal gloss on the name Oberhochwald.”

  Tom paused with several more folders in his hand. “What was the context?”

  “I don’t know. I read Latin, but this was in German. Oh, if I’d only known, I would have sent you an e-mail about it. But I thought—”

  Tom placed a hand on her arm. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Do you have it here? The manuscript the brother asked for. I need to see it.”

  “The original is at Yale—”

  “A copy is fine.”

  “Yes. I was about to ask you that. We kept a copy of the pdf scan in our own database, and df-imaging comes in once a month and organizes the archives for us. I can call it up.”

  “Could y
ou do that for me? Bitte sehr? I mean, pretty please? I’ll finish this.”

  He reached under the table to retrieve another wayward folder. Hot damn! Another blow struck for serendipity! He piled two more folders atop the ones he had. No wonder he hadn’t found any contemporary references to Eifelheim. It hadn’t been called Eifelheim yet. He glanced at the librarian, busy at the keyboard in her office.

  “Entschuldigung,” He called. She paused and turned. “I haven’t even asked your name.”

  “Judy,” she told him. “Judy Cao.”

  “Thank you, Judy Cao.”

  * * *

  It was a slim lead, a loose thread dangling from an old tangle of facts. At some unspecified time in the 14th century a wandering Minorite named Fra Joachim had evidently preached a sermon on “the sorcerers at Oberhochwald.” The text of the sermon had not survived the centuries, but Brother Joachim’s oratorical fame had, and a commentary on the sermon had been included in a treatise on homiletics against witchcraft and devil-worship. A later reader — 16th century to judge by the calligraphy — had added a marginal gloss: Dieser Dorp heißt jetzt Eifelheim. This village is now called Eifelhiem.

  And that meant…

  Tom groaned and laid the printout on the table.

  Judy Cao laid a hand on his arm. “What’s wrong, Doctor Schwoerin?”

  Tom batted the sheet. “I’ve to go back through all these files.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Oh well. Povtorenia — mat’ uchenia.” He pulled the carton closer to him.

  Judy Cao took a folder from the carton and, eyes cast down, turned it over and over in her hands. “I could help,” she suggested.

  “Oh…” He shook his head distractedly. “I can’t ask you to do that.”

  “No, I’m serious.” She looked up. “I volunteer. There’s always a lull on the server after twenty o’clock. The hits from California drop off and the early morning hits from Warsaw or Vienna don’t pick up until later. The math, I can’t do, but research and documentation… I’ll have to check these cartons in real time, of course; but I can also mouse around the Net.”